A Call for Essays | Living Transformation
Dear Readers,
Twice a year Kosmos invites our readers to submit an 800-word essay. We choose two or three essays to publish in our hard copy journal and publish several others in our newsletter and on our website. This is an opportunity for you to share your work and expertise with a significant international audience.
We are preparing the next issue of Kosmos and hope you will participate.…
Youth Passageways | The Need for New Rites of Initiation
by Youth Passageways Cross-Cultural Protocols Working Group: Ramon Parish, Darcy Ottey, Pat McCabe, Sharon Shay Sloan, Sobey Wing, Mark Robinson
YOUTH PASSAGEWAYS is an evolving network of individuals, organizations, and communities supporting the healthy passage of today’s young people into mature adulthood during a time of global transition.
Rite of passage ceremonies are both old and…
Generation Waking Up | Privilege and Social Identity – Getting Real
by Eva Orbuch
GENERATION WAKING UP is a global campaign to ignite a generation of young people to bring forth a thriving, just, sustainable world.
Last Fall, I participated in one of the most meaningful educational experiences of my life—a training facilitated by Generation Waking Up. A very diverse group of 25 young adults spent three whole days together examining the major issues of our…
NextGEN | Learning from the Powerful Model of the Ecovillage
NextGEN is the youth-focused arm of the Global Ecovillage Network, (GEN), an international network that connects communities and people for a positive, regenerative and fulfilling future.
Ecovillages are urban or rural communities of people who strive to integrate a supportive social environment with a low-impact way of life. To achieve this, they integrate various aspects of ecological…
Afghanistan’s Peace College | Can you teach your way out of a war?
By Hodei Sultan and Hamidullah Natiq, from USIP
Last year, amid Afghanistan’s continuing war, the Gawharshad Institute of Higher Education, a private, nonprofit university, conducted a survey of its students’ attitudes toward conflict and violence. The poll, which included 383 responses from a targeted pool of the school’s roughly 1,700 students, was telling: When asked what the students would…
Youth LeadeR | Five Young Activists Speak to Kosmos
Eric Schneider's Youth-LeadeR (YL) is a resource platform and community for "facilitating the emergence of a global, peaceful, just, thriving and sustainable civilization".
How can we make humanity's finest sustainability solutions and role models part of daily life for our global young generation - and equip them for action? This is the question at the heart of Eric Schneider's efforts to…
Earth Guardians | Xiuhtezcatl Martinez on education
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is the youth director of Earth Guardians, a nonprofit that encourages young activists, artists and musicians from around the world to connect and become involved in positive change (#GenerationRyse). In 2013 Xiuhtezcatl received the “Youth Change Maker of the Year” award from President Obama. He has spoken on three occasions at the United Nations, recently daring a group of…
Global Youth Rising
Dear Kosmos Community,
In the same way we have polluted the earth, we have damaged her most precious fruit – our children. Young people are saturated with toxic media, overly programmed and increasingly, over-medicated. The mental health of our teens is a growing concern as access to violent sexual messages and numbingly repetitive killing games wreak effects on their growing brains we have…
The indigenous and modern relationship between people and animals
By Roger Boyd, from Humanities Test
Indigenous groups hold a fundamentally different view of their relationship to animals than do modern industrialized societies. The latter tend toward the view put forward by Descartes (1641) that non-human animals are simply automata, with no ability to reason or have an ability for self-awareness. There are exceptions for animals used as pets, and perhaps…
What Can We Learn From the Dolphin Who Asked Humans for Help?
By Zoe Weil, Humane Connection blog of The Institute for Humane Education
On my way back from China, where I was speaking at the East Asia Regional Council of Schools conference, I spent a week in Hawaii. Visiting Hawaii and seeing lava flow has been a dream of mine for years, and what better opportunity than when I was already flying over the Pacific?
What I hadn’t expected was to…